Synology Disk Station DS409+ NAS Device

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Introduction & Specifications

Regardless of their size or industry, most businesses depend on ready and secure access to their data. To a business, "secure" means that its data is protected from hardware or software failures and is safe from prying eyes. But small and even some medium-sized businesses often can't afford to maintain a data center, let alone a dedicated IT staff. Such businesses still have numerous options for data storage and access solutions, including contracting the service out or even relying on cloud-based solutions. But for those smallish businesses that have tech-savvy staff members, often the preferred solution is to rely on cost-effective onsite storage in the form of business-grade network-attached storage (NAS) devices.

NAS devices come in many different shapes and sizes, as well as with different capacities and features. But for the most-reliable type of storage solution, the NAS devices of choice should be a multi-drive unit with RAID support. It is important to keep in mind, however, that while RAID adds extra layers of fault tolerance in the form redundant data storage--thus making your data's storage more reliable--it is still not a replacement for backing up your data. The best RAID solutions offer easy-to-use and robust tools for doing both.

One great example of such a device is the Synology Disk Station DS409+. The DS409+ is a four-bay NAS device that holds up to four, internal SATA drives that can be set up in a variety of different RAID configurations. The DS409+ also includes an external eSATA port and two USB 2.0 ports, which can be used to attach external hard drives to for additional storage or for dedicated backups of the server; you can also attach up to two printers to the USB ports and use the DS409+ as a print server as well. Unlike many other NAS devices that come with preconfigured storage options, the DS409+ does not come with any hard drives--you actually populate the device with drives you supply yourself. The DS409+ can support up to a total of 8TB of storage, via four 2TB hard drives.

According to a Synology representative, the $599.99 MSRP is expected to drop down to $549.99 soon. But keep in mind that the DS409+'s price represents an unpopulated NAS device. For our testing, we populated the DS409+ with four 500GB Western Digital Caviar Black (WD5001AALS) hard drives, which currently sell for $69.99 on Newegg.com. This brings the total cost of our rig up to $879.95, before tax and shipping. If you were to populate the device with four 2TB drives, the total cost of the rig would be close to $1,500 by today's prices.